She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”
Amy Stechler editing the documentary “Brooklyn Bridge” in the home studio in New Hampshire that she shared with Ken Burns. The film, for which she was also credited as the writer and a producer, was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit.Credit…Ken Burns
Amy Stechler editing the documentary “Brooklyn Bridge” in the home studio in New Hampshire that she shared with Ken Burns. The film, for which she was also credited as the writer and a producer, was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit.Credit…Ken Burns
Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.
Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.
Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.
The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.
“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”
Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.
“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”
“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.
Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.
“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”
The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.
“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”
They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.
“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”
The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.
She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.
Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”
Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.
“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”
Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Credit…Florentine Films
Amy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.
She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.
Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.
“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”
He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.
“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.
Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.
Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”
He summed up her influence on his career simply.
“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said.
Casey Parks’s “Diary of a Misfit” pieces together the elusive history of a Louisiana musician who spent all his life in a community that misgendered him.
Credit…Ana Miminoshvili
By Michelle Hart
Aug. 20, 2022 (NYTimes.com)
DIARY OF A MISFIT: A Memoir and a Mystery, by Casey Parks
There was the elementary school gym teacher rumored to have been in a lesbian relationship with the woman who taught science. There was the hair stylist who flicked his wrist when he spoke and only half-hid hints of his nightlife in drag. There was the androgynous ticket-taker at the art museum who gave back a knowing glance, the softball player, the tween poet and painter. There was Matthew Shepard.
Figures like these frequently populate (and sometimes haunt) the childhoods of L.G.B.T.Q. people, our first brushes with queerness, those “Ring of Keys” moments when we recognized the obfuscated parts of ourselves in someone else. These individuals make up a kind of constructed mythology for us; our own stories are so often an assemblage of the tales — cautionary and celebratory — that came before. They’re embodied intimations of who we could become.
Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger’s past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality, her fraught Southern identity, her tortured yet loving relationship with her mother, and the complicated role of faith in her life.
When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks’s grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, pulled her aside and revealed a startling secret. I grew up across the street from a woman who lived as a man, and then implored Casey to find out what happened to him. Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks’s life-changing journey to unravel the mystery of Roy Hudgins, the small-town country singer from grandmother’s youth, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.
For ten years, Parks traveled back to rural Louisiana and knocked on strangers’ doors, dug through nursing home records, and doggedly searched for Roy’s own diaries, trying to uncover what Roy was like as a person–what he felt; what he thought; and how he grappled with his sense of otherness. With an enormous heart and an unstinting sense of vulnerability, Parks writes about finding oneself through someone else’s story, and about forging connections across the gulfs that divide us.
After a sexually active and probably bisexual youth, Augustine of Hippo became an influential early Christian theologian who was sex-negative but argued that God created intersex people. This contradictory queer saint’s feast day is Aug. 28 in western Christianity.
LGBTQ people may appreciate Augustine’s passionate friendship with another man and his relatively compassionate recognition of gender diversity. Augustine is also often blamed for the misogynist, anti-sex attitude that runs through much of church history. His life and work show that Christians have wrestled with questions of sexuality and gender identity since antiquity.
Augustine is one of the most important Christian thinkers, perhaps second only to Saint Paul of Tarsus. Both are famous converts with a possible same-sex attraction and a sex-negative Christian theology adapted from a classical education.
From 396 to 430 Augustine served as bishop in the North African city of Hippo in present-day Algeria. He also organized a community of men who lived together there like monks and inspired the foundation of a monastic religious order.
Augustine called himself “a slave to lust”
Augustine’s best-known book is “Confessions,” a vivid tell-all memoir that has fascinated and perhaps titillated readers for centuries. Completed in the year 400, “Confessions” is considered the first Western autobiography. This honest account describes his religious development, emotional life and sexual history as a self-proclaimed “slave to lust.”
In addition to the section about his possible male lover, he writes at length of illicit affairs with women and fathering a child with his live-in concubine. It was during this sexually active period that he uttered the humorously human prayer that has become famous, living on as a slogan on mugs, T-shirts and such: “God, give me chastity and moderation — but not yet.”
Augustine’s “Give me chastity” prayer was a framed embroidery at Etsy
Augustine’s antagonism toward sex is legendary. He was among the first to claim that Sodom was destroyed for the sin of homosexuality. Earlier understandings, even within the Bible itself, identified the sin of Sodom as abusing strangers. He condemned “sodomy” and his own “past foulnesses and carnal corruptions.” But he was less extreme than some of his contemporaries because Augustine conceded that there was some acceptable sex (for procreation within marriage).
His own preference showed when he wondered why God even created women. “How much more agreeable for companionship in a life shared together would be two male friends rather than a man and a woman,” he wrote in “De Genesi ad litteram” (The Literal Meaning of Genesis).
He encouraged intimacy between men in his advice on how to do the kiss of peace after the Eucharist: “When your lips draw near to those of your brother, do not let your heart withdraw from his,” he wrote.
Augustine was born and raised in Africa
Augustine grew up in Roman culture where homosexuality was accepted as normal. Aurelius Augustinus, known as Augustine, (Nov. 13, 354 – Aug. 28, 430) was born in the Roman city of Thagaste in Algeria to a Romanized family with Berber (Amazigh) heritage. No record of his appearance exists, but because he was African there is reason to believe he had dark skin. He has been portrayed as black at various times and places throughout art history and in contemporary works by artists such as John Nava and Bruce Herman.
Saint Augustine, artist unknown
His father, Patricius, was a pagan landowner with Roman roots and his mother, Monica, was a pious Christian who was canonized later as a Catholic saint. Monica has been proposed as a patron saint for parents of LGBTQ people.
Augustine appears with his mother Monica before they were saints in an 1846 painting by Ary Scheffer (Wikipedia)
A brilliant student, he received a classical Latin education and then became a rhetoric professor. Like most men in his culture, he had a stronger emotional connection to other men than to women, except his mother.
“Although it is debatable to what extent, if any, these passionate friendships were homoerotic, they express a sensibility that today is probably to be found, at least in Western industrial societies, only among gay men,” wrote Toronto historian Brad Walton in “Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage.”
Augustine and the man he loved
Many see self-incriminating proof of Augustine’s homosexual affairs in his own statements about his youth in Book 3.1 (translated by Carolinne White):
“To love and also be loved in return was what excited me, especially if I could enjoy my lover’s body. So I polluted the stream of friendship with the filth of lust and obscured its brightness with foul passions. But despite this shameful and degrading behavior, in my excessive vanity I hoped to be regarded as elegant and civilized.”
“Saint Augustine of Hippo: Lord, Make Me Pure, But Not Yet” by Sarah Talbot (available on Etsy)
One same-sex relationship stands out in particular. As he wrote in “Confessions,” Augustine fell completely in love with an unnamed young man when they were both in their late teens. His beloved was a fellow student who had grown up with him. This “most dear friend” was “sweet to me above all sweetness… I felt that my soul and his soul were ‘one soul in two bodies,’ ” Augustine wrote. Many have interpreted their relationship as homosexual.
But the friend developed a fever and died. Augustine was devastated by grief, which he described in dramatic terms that echo across the ages. Here is just part of his lengthy description of his turmoil:
“When my friend died, grief darkened my heart and wherever I looked, all I could see was death. My home town was a torture to me and my family home a place of misery. All that I had shared with my friend became excruciating without him. I hated everything because he was absent; nowhere I went could say to me, ‘Look, here he is,’ as it did when he was alive but not with me….
“I wept bitterly and found consolation in my bitterness…. I was amazed that other people were alive when the man I had loved as if he were immortal was dead. I was even more amazed that I was alive when he was dead, since I was his second self. Someone expressed it well when he called his friend ‘half of his soul,’ for I felt that my soul and my friend’s had been one soul in two bodies.” (Book 4.4-6)
These quotes come from a translation by Carolinne White in the first modern illustrated edition of the “Confessions.” Her translation is enhanced by medieval and Renaissance art from manuscripts at the British Library.
There are many other English translations of “Confessions.” Two versions that are recommended by Q Spirit for accuracy and readability are by Henry Chadwick in 2009 or Maria Boulding in 2002.
Augustine decided to leave Thagaste to escape the torment of missing his deceased friend. At age 17, he moved to Carthage in Tunisia, marking a spiritual turning point that eventually led to Christian conversion and baptism in Milan when he was 32.
Baptism of Augustine by Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-65 (Wikipedia)
“Odd it is to note that the most famous conversion in Christian history, after that of St. Paul, originated in one man’s love for another,” writes historian Paul Halsall in his online Calendar of LGBT Saints. His essay also includes the full set of quotations in which Augustine describes his relationship with his beloved male friend.
Augustine said God created gender diversity
Many contemporary LGBTQ people reject Augustine’s teachings on sexual activity, but his ideas about gender diversity are much more in tune with contemporary queer theology.
He wrote a section affirming intersex people as part of God’s creation in “City of God,” a major book of Christian philosophy. The book is regarded as “a masterpiece of Western culture” by Encyclopedia Britannica and many others. Writing in Latin, Augustine used the terms “hermaphrodite” or “androgyne” to denote an intersex person. In Book 16 of “City of God” he writes:
“God, the Creator of all, knows where and when each thing ought to be, or to have been created, because He sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole…. As for the Androgyni, or Hermaphrodites, as they are called, though they are rare, yet from time to time there appears persons of sex so doubtful, that it remains uncertain from which sex they take their name,”
Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski provides a full in-depth analysis of Augustine’s writings on gender diversity in her article “The Sites of Hermaphrodites: Intersex in the Greco-Roman World.” She teaches transgender and intersex history at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She writes:
“The idea that hermaphrodites are monsters that signal failures of embodiment that should be eschewed to the margins is condemned by Augustine as heretical and small-minded. Whether or not intersex is a human person or another race of people entirely, they are members of God’s world. To call hermaphrodites disordered in their embodiment is to critique God their creators. Augustine writes, “What if God has seen fit to create some races in this way, that we might not suppose that the monstrous births which appear among ourselves are the failures of that wisdom whereby He fashions the human nature, as we speak of the failure of a less perfect workman?” (Augustine XVI.viii).
Looking carefully at each line in Augustine’s text, Bychowski goes on to say:
…The problem is not in the true lives of the hermaphrodites but in the environment that misunderstands them and fears sharing the world with them. “But He who cannot see the whole is offended by the deformity of the part,” writes Augustine, “because he is blind to that which balances it, and to which it belongs.” (Augustine XVI.viii).
In a section that may relate to transgender people, Augustine criticized the pagan cult of the Great Mother goddess Cybele for having castrated eunuch priests who were “neither changed into a woman nor allowed to remain a man.” (City of God VII.xxiv)
Augustine’s extensive career in the church came to a close when he died of illness at age 75 during the siege of Hippo by Germanic Vandals. He was canonized by popular acclaim, and later honored as a doctor of the church. His feast is celebrated on Aug. 28 by western churches and June 15 in the Orthodox tradition.
In an updated queer iteration of the canonization process, Augustine is included on the Advocate’s “30 LGBT Saints” list.
Saint Augustine by Philippe de Champaigne, 1645-50 (Wikipedia)
Most images of Augustine show him in old age as a bishop dressed in splendid vestments. The standard iconography pictures him holding a flaming heart and/or a book. The heart in his hands is not the usual Sacred Heart of Jesus that often appears in Christian icons. Augustine holds his OWN flaming heart. Experts explain that this symbolizes the intensity of his own heart on fire with love of God — or how the heart may burn with “lascivious and harmful loves” until it is given to God.
The conflict between Augustine’s sexuality and spirituality is expressed particularly well in a portrait by French Baroque artist Philippe de Champaigne. In this painting, Augustine looks away from his flaming heart and holds it at arms length like a hot potato, touching it with only his fingertips to avoid getting burned.
In addition to his honored role in the church, Augustine has entered the popular imagination. He even appears on a mug at the DrinklingsCoffeeMugs Etsy shop.with one of his best-known quotes: “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.”
Saint Augustine’s face appears with one of his most famous quotes on mugs available at Etsy.
Other popular quotes by Augustine include:
“You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
“This very moment I may, if I desire, become the friend of God.”
“There is no saint without a past, no sinner without a future.” (later paraphrased by celebrated gay writer Oscar Wilde)
LGBTQ-Liberation Prayer to Augustine
Canadian gay theologian Donald Boisvert wrote a prayer to Augustine and the Apostle Paul from an LGBTQ-liberation perspective. The prayer is included in his 2004 book “Sanctity and Male Desire: A Gay Reading of Saints.” His chapter on Paul and Augustine draws parallels between the two saints. They are both intellectuals who had dramatic conversion experiences and wrote influential sex-negative theology. Here is his prayer:
Blessed Paul and Augustine, doctors and defenders of the faith, men of integrity, architects of an inhuman theology of sexuality, you have done us harm. We are grateful for the beauty and passion of your words, but we also pray that our common brotherly love will shield us from their poison. You have been misused to condemn us and our desires for the affections and bodies of other men. We think you understood us. We need you now to stand with us. Inspire and motivate the leaders of our faith to see the hatred they spread against us in your name. Convert them as you were once converted. Be our strength, our bold and born-again guides. Amen.
___ Top image credit: Detail from “St Jerome and St Augustine” by Carlo Crivelli, c. 1490 (Wikiepdia)
___ This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published in August 2019, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on Aug. 27, 2022.
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
Joseph, a popular figure in the Bible’s Book of Genesis, can be seen as a gender-nonconformist who inspires LGBTQ people today.
Queer Bible scholars focus on how Joseph wore a robe that is usually known in English as a “coat of many colors,” but could be translated as a rainbow-colored “princess dress.”
Even before birth, there was something queer about Joseph. According to ancient commentaries known as midrash, Joseph and his half-sister Dinah were miraculously switched in the womb, meaning that they changed gender even before they were born.
Joseph’s father, Jacob, loved him more than any of this other children, so he had a special robe made for him. In Hebrew the robe is called “ketonet passim.” Its meaning is considered unclear by many traditional Bible scholars. Various translations use terms such as “a robe with long sleeves,” “an elaborately embroidered coat” or “a varicolored tunic.”
The only other use of the term is in II Samuel 13, where princess Tamar wears a “ketonet passim” and the author helpfully explains that this is “how the virgin daughters of the king were clothed in earlier times.”
Traditional Bible scholars found it confusing that Joseph would wear an article of female clothing, the meaning is clear enough to today’s queer people of faith. Joseph was able to interpret dreams, and his rainbow robe also suggests the multi-colored garments that are sometimes worn by shamans and magicians.
From a queer perspective, it’s not surprising that when Joseph’s 11 brothers saw “that dreamer” in his princess dress, they got so upset that they attacked him and sold him into slavery. There is even a theory that the Egyptian officer Potiphar bought Joseph as a sex slave to satisfy his homosexual desire. The Bible story goes on to tell how Joseph triumphed in the end, rising to become Egypt’s second most powerful man and rescuing his family from starvation during a famine.
The story of Joseph and his princess dress (Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28) is part of the three-year cycle of lectionary readings. It will be read again at many churches worldwide on Sunday, Aug. 13, 2023.
Resources on the queer Joseph of Genesis
There are many books, artworks, articles and videos that provide more queer insights into Joseph. They include:
Joseph wears a rainbow dress in a photo by queer artist Laura Sommer of Heidelberg, Germany. She describes herself as “disabled, Autistic, queer, non-binary, aro/ace (aromantic/asexual), Christian and a neeeeeeerd.” On her website Wibbley Wobbley Minds, she uses Playmobil toy figurines to recreate the life of Joseph and other stories from the Bible and literature.
Jade Sylvan won the Billings Preaching Prize at Harvard Divinity School in 2019 with a video sermon on Joseph and the princess dress. Sylvan wrote “Beloved King,” a musical about David and Jonathan, as one of the requirements for a master of divinity degree at Harvard.
There’s even a Joseph of Genesis patch that can be ordered in the colors of the rainbow flag, the trans pride flag, bi pride flag, asexual pride flag, nonbinary pride flag and more from the Sapphic Stiches Etsy shop.
A popular mainstream retelling of the story is “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” a musical with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
___ Note on pronouns: This article follows Biblical tradition by using he/him/his pronouns for Joseph.
___ Top image credit: Joseph wears his princess dress as he tells his brothers about his dreams in an illustration of Genesis Chapter 37 by Sweet Publishing (Wikipedia)
___ This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit in August 2020, was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on Aug. 14, 2022.
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
Some scholars believe the Biblical Song of Songs was originally written as same-sex love poetry. Paul R. Johnson translated it as “a gay love poem” and Angela Yarber sees it as erotic poetry between a woman and her female lover. Others are “queering” the scripture in a wide variety of creative or scholarly projects.
The song celebrates erotic love between two lovers. They do not have proper names, but the central figure is called “the Shulamite” in Song 6:13. This obscure Hebrew term is often understood to mean a person from Jerusalem.
Traditional theologians present the Song of Songs as a heterosexual love story. They explain away the eroticism of the Bible’s sexiest book as an allegory for love between God and a human soul, Yahweh and the Israelites or Christ and the church.
The song salutes not only sexuality in general, but black beauty in particular. In a popular line that didn’t make it into the lectionary, the scripture affirms, “I am black and beautiful.” (Song of Songs 1:5).
Many Protestant churches read Song of Songs (also called Song of Solomon or Canticles) 2:8-13 as the lectionary reading on Aug. 29, 2021. This is the only passage from Song of Songs that appears in the three-year lectionary cycle.
It’s actually confusing to identify who is saying what in the original Hebrew text for the Song of Songs. The gender of the speakers is uncertain in many cases, and the number of speakers is also unclear.
The two main characters are traditionally identified as Bride and Groom or the Beloved and King Solomon. Nobody knows who wrote the Song of Songs, but authorship is traditionally attributed to Solomon, who reigned in the tenth century BCE. He was the son of David, whose same-sex love with Jonathan is well documented.
Most translations of the Songs of Songs impose a heterosexual interpretation. One version that is not cluttered with hetero commentary is “The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible,” translated by Marcia Falk, a feminist scholar who did her doctoral thesis on Song of Songs. Its meditative design leaves lots of white space and even includes the Hebrew text on facing pages.
While queer scholars wrestle with the Song of Songs, others create events such as Urban Adamah’s “Song of Songs Seder: Celebrating Queer Sexuality” or use it to inspire contemporary LGBTQ art and poetry.
Song of Songs translated as a gay love poem
Evangelical minister and scholar Paul Robert Johnson took the gay understanding to new heights in his revolutionary book “Ancient Answers to Modern Gay Problems: A New Discovery of Old Manuscripts: The Song of Songs, a Gay Love Poem?”
After 20 years studying the original Hebrew text, he concluded that both the Shulamite and the Shulamite’s lover were male. His translation reflects their same-sex love. In his version, the Shulamite is Asher, a black son of Solomon, and his beloved is a man named Caleh, a shepherd-soldier. Here is how Johnson translated Song of Songs 4:10-11:
“How delightful you are Caleh, My lover-man, my other half. Your pleasing masculine love is better than wine. The smell of your body is better than perfume. Your moustache is waxed with honeycomb Honey and milk are under your tongue. The scent of your clothing is like the smell of Lebanon.”
Johnson’s book on the Song of Songs was published in 1990 by Fidelity Press, but is out of print and extremely hard to find. Online it has been known primarily through an often-republished 1995 review by Jim Kepner, founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, and co-founder of ONE Institute. There is also a critical article debunking Johnson’s approach. Q Spirit founder Kittredge Cherry managed to track down a partial copy of the book for this article, with help from Hunter Flournoy of spiritjourneys.com.
“Ancient Answers to Modern Gay Problems: The Song of Songs, a Gay Love Poem?” by Paul R. Johnson is out of print and hard to find.
To translate the Song of Songs, Johnson relied on fragmentary pre-Masoretic texts. He found that editors had covered up the original same-sex love in Song of Songs. They made it appear to be heterosexual by hiding the Shulamite’s male name and changing the gender of the lover and beloved in many passages. Johnson tracked down an earlier, more accurate version on several scraps of the song with the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumram cave #4.
The back cover of the book explains that the love between Jonathan and David or Ruth and Naomi implies acceptance of homosexuality during Biblical times, but does not provide irrefutable proof. The cover text continues:
“Can it be that such evidence has been hidden all along in the book of the Bible known as The Song of Songs (also called The Song of Solomon and the Canticles)? Is it possible that the pair of lovers in this cherished monument of biblical literature were actually two gay men? Dr. Paul R. Johnson answers that question with a resounding YES…. Johnson claims that The Song of Songs is the work of Asher, a son of Solomon and one of his numerous foreign wives (perhaps the black queen of Sheba). In his translation, Prince Asher is a ‘comely’ young negro male who has encountered the fair Caleh, his cousin, on a three-month tour of military service. Caleh has left his flocks to fulfill his national obligation (probably as a guard of the harem in the royal palace) which has brought him in contact with the prince. The two have fallen in love, and in the poem, Asher sings the physical beauty of Caleh and the excellence of their relationship throughout a course of separations and reunions.”
Love between men is pictured on a page from Johnson’s gay translation of Song of Songs 7:10-13: “I belong to my love and his desire is for me…”
Kepner’s review of the book concludes, “The Song of Songs now stands as the most explicit homoerotic love poem in the Bible, with clear naming of this thing going into that thing. Johnson’s small book is a must for all Jewish or Christian gays, though many might be too timid to abandon conventional hetero mistranslations.”
In a long and illustrious career, Johnson served as chairman of the board of the Lambdas, an early gay Christian organization dedicated to “informing our Christian and Jewish friends about the true nature of homosexuality as it relates to the church of our day,” and general moderator of Fidelity, “an association of gay, lesbian and homophile fundamentalists.” He pastored churches in Georgia, Illinois, New Jersey, and Washington state before moving to southern California. He then held various positions, including counselor and information director at the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Community Services Center. Johnson wrote many books, pamphlets and articles about Christianity and LGBTQ issues for the Advocate and other magazines. His other books include “Homosexuality and the Biblical Texts” and “Gays and the New Right: A Debate on Homosexuality.”
Claiming the Shulamite and her female lover in Song of Songs
Scholar and Baptist minister Angela Yarber’s research led her to the opposite conclusion. She believes that the Shulamite and her lover were probably both women.
Christian feminists generally see Song of Songs as an exemplary text with some of the Bible’s most positive representations of womanhood. The Shulamite is held up as a female role because she boldly affirms her body, her sexuality and erotic pleasure for its own sake. In contrast to other parts of the Bible, the Shulamite is honored for her sexuality, not attacked as a whore or forced into motherhood.
“Shulamite” by Angela Yarber
Yarber takes it further with her lesbian interpretation of the Song of Songs. She has done in-depth study of the Shulamite, painted her portrait and written extensively about her.
She explained her thinking in an interview with the Jesus in Love Blog / Q Spirit:
“The Shulamite is a dancer in Song of Songs 7, which says in part, ‘How beautiful are your sandaled feet, O prince’s daughter. The curves of your (quivering) thighs like jewels crafted by artist hands.’ I first discovered her when a dance historian mentioned her dance as a form of bellydance. This passing reference led me to translate, exegete, and publish an article about the Shulamite’s bellydance called ‘Undulating the Holy.’ Since bellydance is historically a dance performed by women in the context women, men were rarely permitted to witness bellydance. In other words, it would be an anachronism to propose that the lover doting upon the Shulamite was male. Additionally, many of the women in all female harems performed bellydance and engaged in same-sex relations with other women in the harems. Consequently, the queer history of bellydance, combined with the absence of male pronouns in the poem describing the Shulamite in Song of Songs 7 led me to conclude that the Shulamite’s lover was likely another female. What is more, the idea of homo and heterosexuality are not transhistorical essences, but instead are relatively recent socio-historical constructs. To say that there were strict sexual binaries in the ancient world in which the Shulamite lived would also be an anachronism. Sexuality was much more fluid. This dance and the poem describing the Shulamite are also very affirming of the female body. In these ways, the Shulamite is holy and empowering not just for women in general, but also for lesbians in particular.”
Her claims are backed up by solid scholarly research. She wrote her master’s thesis, “Embodied Liberation: Women in Ancient Israelite Dance,” at McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta, Georgia. Her Ph.D. dissertation at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California was on “Dancing Feet Find Holy Ground: Embodying the Feminine in the Dances of the World’s Religions.” She is founder and creative director of the Tehom Center (formerly called Holy Women Icons Project).
Yarber is also an artist, and she echoes the bellydance scripture in her icon of the Shulamite: “Her quivering curves and undulating lines proclaimed praise and love. Her body was beloved and holy, sacredly sensuous. She was a dancer divine.” The Shulamite is one of more than 100 voluptuous, vibrantly alive and life-giving women who appear Yarber’s colorful contemporary Holy Women Icons series. Since 2009, Yarber has painted more than 100 Holy Women Icons. These colorful, folk feminist icons are displayed in homes and galleries all over the world. They can also be found in her book “Holy Women Icons.”
Yarber shares more of her research and her own woman-centered translation of the passage about the quivering thighs (Song of Songs 7:1-4) in an article on the Feminism and Religion blog.
Song of Songs inspires LGBTQ people
Over the centuries the Song of Songs has been a touchstone for a wide variety of LGBTQ writers and theologians:
Bernard of Clairvaux, a medieval French abbot who had a passionate same-sex friendship, wrote a series of 86 sermons on the Song of Songs.
Victorian poet and painter Simeon Solomon, who was arrested in 1873 for sexual behavior with a man, found coded ways to connect the Song of Songs with male-male eroticism. His work is a popular topic with queer scholars today.
The Song of Songs plays a small but important role in one of the all-time most popular gay novels, “The Front Runner” by Patricia Nell Warren. The 1974 novel is a love story between a track coach and his star athlete. It became the first contemporary gay fiction book to hit the New York Times bestseller list, selling 10 million copies in seven languages.
Articles about “The Front Runner” almost always fail to mention the coach’s gay Christian side. The novel describes this bedroom scene of the gay lovers: “Before going to sleep we often lay propped in bed, reading…. I often read the Bible, letting its comfort and truth sink into me. Jesus had said that the last would be first. Society said that we were the last. It could be Jesus had meant the gays.”
Later the men create their own wedding service to make a formal public declaration of their love: “It consisted simply of quotes, each of us alternating. In his soft voice, Billy read from the teachings of Buddha… Then I read from the Bible, mostly the Song of Songs.”
For some LGBTQ people of faith, the dance of intimacy in Song of Songs may symbolize their feelings as they wonder whether to respond to God’s love while fearing rejection over their sexual orientation or gender identity.
LGBTQ Christian meme based on Song of Songs
A meme circulated on social media in 2021 generated some controversy even in the LGBTQ community by implying that the Song of Songs was a metaphor for Christ’s love of the LGBTQ community. Even a gay man called it “just pure blasphemy” when he first read:
“Words of Jesus to the rainbow community: You are altogether beautiful, my darling; in you there is no flaw. — Song of Songs 4:7”
Queer Bible scholars explore Song of Songs
An almost overwhelming amount of queer Bible scholarship examines the Song of Songs. Here is a sampling of some chapters and articles:
Chapter on Song of Songs by Christopher King in “Queer Bible Commentary,” edited by Deryn Guest), Robert Goss, Mona West and Thomas Bohache.
“Queer Readings of the Song of Songs” by Karin Hügel (Journal of the European Society of Women in Theological Research) ___ Top image credit: A heart shaped shadow is cast on a Bible open to the Song of Solomon in “Book of Love” by Jonathan Thorne (Wikipedia) ___ This post is part of the LGBTQ Saints series by Kittredge Cherry. Traditional and alternative saints, people in the Bible, LGBT and queer martyrs, authors, theologians, religious leaders, artists, deities and other figures of special interest to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people and our allies are covered.
This article was originally published on Q Spirit on Sept. 6, 2021 was expanded with new material over time, and was most recently updated on Sept. 3, 2022.
Kittredge Cherry is a lesbian Christian author who writes regularly about LGBTQ spirituality.She holds degrees in religion, journalism and art history.She was ordained by Metropolitan Community Churches and served as its national ecumenical officer, advocating for LGBTQ rights at the National Council of Churches and World Council of Churches.
Jay Levin is an American journalist who was founder, editor and CEO of the LA Weekly, one of the seminal newspapers of the weekly alternative press in the United States, until 1992. Currently he is founding President of The Big EQ Campaign, a non-profit organization that has undertaken a mass marketing campaign called EQuip Our Kids! to mobilize the public to mandate that social and emotional learning (SEL) skills be included in every schools curriculum. He is also chair of the California Social-Emotional Learning Alliance, an assemblage of educators and education and grassroots organizations that advocates for universal statewide SEL from pre-school through high school.
Early life
Jay Levin was born in New York, the son of a tool-and-die maker.
Career
Jay Levin is best known as the founder of the LA Weekly, of which he was editor-in-chief and president for many years before selling what he had grown to be the largest and most successful city weekly in the country. Levin put together an investment group that included actor Michael Douglas, Burt Kleiner, Joe Benadon and Pete Kameron. The publication’s first issue featured a group of female comedians, including the then-little known Sandra Bernhard, on its cover. Subsequent issues featured exposés on the Los Angeles basin’s air quality and U.S. interventionism in Central America. The LA Weekly was also notable for its coverage of independent cinema and the Los Angeles music scene.
Levin retained many of the writers he had earlier brought to the Los AngelesFree Press and hired Joie Davidow to edit the arts and entertainment section. Davidow produced a comprehensive calendar section and explored undiscovered fashion districts, discovering new designers.
In 1985, the LA Weekly launched a glossy magazine, L.A. Style, which Davidow edited. L.A. Style was sold to American Express Publishing Co. in 1988 and merged with Buzz magazine in 1993.[1]
By 1990, the LA Weekly achieved a circulation of 165,000, making it the largest urban weekly in the US.
Post-LA Weekly
Levin stepped down as president of the LA Weekly in 1992 in order to found a progressive cable TV network and was succeeded by Michael Sigman as publisher and Kit Rachlis as editor. The newspaper was sold to Stern Publishing, owner of the Village Voice, in 1994; in October 2005, it was sold to the Phoenix, Arizona-based Village Voice Media. In September 2012, it was transferred to the Denver-based Voice Media Group in a management buyout.[2]
Levin founded the start-up progressive channel, Planet Central TV, and later a website and magazine called Real Talk L.A.[3]
Recent career
For the last 20 years Levin has split his time between starting, growing or turning around media properties such as TheFix.com; and on life coaching focused on teaching life mastery and helping people reorient their lives, careers and relationships without spending years in therapy. Most recently he has been working with 15 to 20 CEOs on becoming socially conscious and effective managers while helping them elevate the bottom-line performance of their businesses and grow their companies.
Based on his knowledge of the positive effects of Life skills training, Levin early in 2016 launched The Big EQ Campaign to galvanize the public around schools including daily curriculum education for students and staff in emotional management and in relationship and co-creativity social skills – to the profound benefit of children, teens, adults, the schools themselves, and society and business (the economy) as a whole. When training in EQ development is combined with training in the skills to relate empathically to and communicate well with others, and to make cogent decisions, the familiar term used in academic circles for such overall life skills training is “Social and Emotional Learning,” known as SEL.
The Campaign argues that evidence shows that SEL skills and capacities can have a remarkable positive effect on a person’s life, ability to learn, and long-term success. So much so that SEL (which includes EQ development) has the potential to elevate society as a whole – in the form of better relationships all around, less conflict, and more productive and healthier individuals, workplaces, institutions and communities. SEL training tends to dissipate violence, racism, hard drug usage and other forms of anti-social mindsets and behaviors while improving academic and life-long success and lowering criminal justice, mental and physical health and other social costs.
Over the years Levin has worked with hundreds of individuals one-on-one. Encouraged by clients, he also began offering courses to hundreds of people in Life Elevation, relationships and leadership. Highly successful in terms of reorienting people’s lives, careers and inner and outer relations for the better, the courses (like his personal coaching) allow individuals to learn systems they can use to benefit themselves – in effect, participants, including CEOS, learn to become their own coaches. Along with gaining mastery of inner emotional and mental demons, participants gain a sophisticated and necessary education in the realities of human inter-reaction and selfhood that the culture fails to provide en masse. Participants report learning tools that give them more confidence in nearly every situation and which make them better able to cope when challenged.[4]
5g is being rolled out across the country, despite growing evidence that it is disruptive to our health, our safety, and the environment. The Invisible Rainbow is the groundbreaking story of electricity as it’s never been told before–exposing its very real impact on the biosphere and human health.
100,000 copies sold!
Over the last 220 years, society has evolved a universal belief that electricity is ‘safe’ for humanity and the planet. Scientist and journalist Arthur Firstenberg disrupts this conviction by telling the story of electricity in a way it has never been told before–from an environmental point of view–by detailing the effects that this fundamental societal building block has had on our health and our planet.
In The Invisible Rainbow, Firstenberg traces the history of electricity from the early eighteenth century to the present, making a compelling case that many environmental problems, as well as the major diseases of industrialized civilization–heart disease, diabetes, and cancer–are related to electrical pollution.
Few individuals today are able to grasp the entirety of a scientific subject and present it in a highly engaging manner . . . Firstenberg has done just that with one of the most pressing but neglected problems of our technological age.–BRADLEY JOHNSON, MD, Amen Clinic, San Francisco
Something like a hymn, a prayer, a work of devotion rather than philosophical analysis. A book that could be read (perhaps should be read) contemplatively rather than discursively, so that each sentence and word is allowed to work its way through the frantic motions of our brains into the quieter notions of our hearts, shaping a whole new and wonderful vision of the world. For it is all of creation, both visible and invisible, that Picard senses as emerging from the fertile womb of silence, about which adjectives like divine and holy and life-giving might properly be applied: ‘it is a positive, a complete world unto itself.’ Whether Picard is speaking of God or man, language or music, the world of nature or of human artifice, silence is the lingua franca which he develops in images both aural and (even more strikingly) visual: ‘the branches of the trees are like dark lines that have followed the movements of the silence; the leaves thickly cover the branches as if the silence wanted to conceal itself. . .The forest is like a great reservoir of silence out of which the silence trickles in a thin, slow stream and fills the air with its brightness.’ Picard’s great prose poem, like the silence it depicts, ‘does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no other purpose; it cannot be exploited.’ Perhaps herein also lies our highest praise for this remarkable book.
Written by the pioneering scientist, theorist and activist J. D. Bernal, this futuristic essay explores the radical changes to human bodies and intelligence that science may bring about, and suggests the impact of these developments on society. Bernal presents a far-reaching vision of the future that encompasses space research and colonization, material sciences, genetic engineering, and the technological hive mind. In his view, it will be possible for the conditions of civilization to reach a state of materialist utopia. For all three realms—the world, the flesh, and the devil—Bernal attempted to map out the utmost limit of technoscientific progress, and found that there are almost no limits.
With a new introduction by McKenzie Wark.
(versobooks.com)
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
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